“Nothing happens for a couple of minutes,” Emmet said.

The image zipped with static, then the two spacesuits emerged from the airlock and carried on walking down the ledge.

“The footprint guys?” Al suggested.

“I think so. But I don’t think they’re part of Bernhard’s hit.”

“Sure they are. They didn’t holler about what happened.”

“They’re in spacesuits, so they’re not possessed. Look at it from their angle. They’ve just stumbled over the newly dead corpse of one of your senior lieutenants, and they’ve even got his blood on their boots. There’s no one else around they can point the finger at. What would you do?”

“Keep my mouth shut,” Al agreed. “Do you know who they are?”

“This is where it gets odd. I backtracked them; they came out of a hellhawk called Mindori .”

“Goddamn! Kiera’s people.”

“I don’t think so.” The camera memory played on, showing the two spacesuited figures getting into a small truck and driving it round to another airlock. “I couldn’t get a record off the cameras in this section either. So I don’t know what they got up to inside. But it was a different program which erased their memories, not the same one used in Bernhard’s hit.” One of the spacesuited figures re-emerged onto the docking ledge and loaded several trays of small packages onto the truck. It was then driven back to the Mindori . The figure eventually climbed back up into the hellhawk’s life support module.

“Kiera doesn’t use non-possessed to crew her hellhawks,” Emmet said. “And that guy was still on board when it took off. The other one must still be inside the habitat.”

“Je-zus. He’s walking around in here?”

“Looks that way. All we know for sure is that they’re nothing to do with Kiera.”

“But he could be the goddamn Confederation Navy. Some kind of assassin. Their version of Kingsley Pryor.”

“I’m not so sure, Al. Those boxes in the truck. I ran a search through our store’s inventory. It’s not exactly tight at the best of times, but there’s a lot of electronics I can’t account for. I can’t see the Confederation Navy breaking in here to steal a truck full of spare parts. That doesn’t make any sense.”

Al stared at the screen, which had frozen on the last image of the spacesuited guy stepping into Mindori ’s airlock. “All right, so we’ve got two separate things going on here. Kiera hits Bernhard, and a hellhawk helps someone steal our electrical stuff. The first one I can understand. But the hellhawk . . . Can you figure what it’s doing?”

“No. But it’s back here right now. We can just ask it straight out. Mindori docked on the ledge this morning. Kiera’s got her engineering teams out there fitting it ready for a long-duration flight. Something else to consider: our defence network says another hellhawk has gone missing from its patrol. They’re running a check on the rest to see how many are still there.”

Al leaned back into the chair, and grinned happily. “They could be trying to break free. How long till that food factory they need is fixed?”

“Another week. Five days if we really hustle.”

“Then hustle, Emmet. Meantime I’m going out to take a ride in Cameron. He can talk to the other hellhawks for me, without Kiera listening in.”

Gerald’s fractured thoughts slithered through a universe of darkness and pain. He didn’t know where he was, what he was doing. He didn’t really care. Flashes erupted from time to time as neurons made erratic connections, releasing bright images of Marie. His thoughts clustered round them like worshipful congregations. The reason for such adulation was slipping from him.

Voices began to impinge on his miserable existence. A chorus of whispers. Insistent. Relentless. Growing louder, stronger. They began to intrude on his vague consciousness.

A blast of white-hot pain put him in sudden, frightening contact with his body again.

Let us in. End the torment. We can help.

The pain changed position and texture. Burning.

We can stop it.

I can stop it. Let me in. I want to help.

No, me. I’m the one you need.

Me.

I have the secret to end their torture.

There was sound. Real sound, rattling through the air. His own thin screams. And laughter. Cruel cruel laughter.

Gerald.

No, he told them. No, I won’t. Not again. I’d rather die.

Gerald, let me in. Don’t fight.

I’ll die for Marie. Rather that . . .

Gerald, it’s me. Feel me. Know me. Taste my memories.

She said . . . She said she’d . . . Oh no. Not that. Don’t make me, not with her. No.

I know. I was there. Now let me come through. It’s difficult, I know. But we have to help her. We have to help Marie. This is the only way now.

Astonishment at the soul’s identity crumbled his mental barriers. The soul roared through from the beyond, permeating his body; the energy it brought seething along his limbs, sparkling down his spinal column. Invigorating. New memories invaded his synapses, colliding with the emplaced recollections in cascades of sights, sounds, tastes, and sensation. It wasn’t like before. Before, he’d been confined, shoved down to the very edge of awareness, knowing of the outside by the tiniest trickle of nerve impulses. A passive, near-insensate passenger/prisoner in his own body. This time it was a more equal partnership, though the newcomer was dominant.

Gerald’s eyes opened, a flush of energistic power helping them to focus. Another application finally banished the terrible headache that had raged for so long.

Two of Kiera’s bodyguards were smirking down at him. “Who’s a lucky boy then,” one chortled. “Man, you are in for the shag of a lifetime tonight.”

Gerald raised a hand. Two searing spears of white fire flashed from his fingertips, drilling straight through the craniums of both bodyguards. Four souls gibbered their fury as they plunged back into the beyond.

“I have other plans for this evening, thank you,” said Loren Skibbow.

It had been a while since Al took a ride in his rocketship. Sitting in the fat green-leather couch on the hellhawk’s promenade deck made him realize just how long. He stretched out, putting his feet up.

“Where can I take you, Al?” Cameron’s voice asked from the silver tannoy grill on the wall.

“Just off Monterey, you know.” He needed a break, just a short time alone to get his head around what was happening. In the old days he would have just gone for a drive, maybe take a fishing rod with him. Golf, too, he’d played golf a few times; though not to any rules the Royal and Ancient had ever heard about. Just buddies fooling round on a fine day.

The view through the big forward window showed him the asteroid’s counter-rotating spaceport slipping away overhead as they leapt off the docking ledge. Gravity inside the cabin was rock steady. New California tracked in from the riveted steel rim around the window, a silvery half crescent, like the moon had looked on clear summer nights above Brooklyn. He never could get used to how much cloud planets had. It was amazing anyone on the surface ever saw the sun.

Cameron was curving out from the big asteroid, rolling continually like a playful dolphin. If Al looked back through the portholes down the side of the promenade deck, he could see brilliant sunlight sweeping over the yellow fins and scarlet fuselage.

“Hey, Cameron, can you show me the Orion Nebula?”

The hellhawk’s antics slowed. Its nose swung across the starscape, hunting like a compass needle. “There we go. Should be dead centre in the window now.”

Al saw it then, a delicate haze of light, like God had wet his thumb and smeared a star across the canvas of space. He sat back in the couch and drank cappuccino from a tiny cup as he looked at it. Weird little thing. A fog in space, Emmet said. Where stars are born. The Martians and their death rays lived on the other side.